Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine

Joe Cleary

Cambridge University Press, Jan 3, 2002 - History - 259 pages

The history of partition in the twentieth century is one steeped in controversy and violence. Literature, Partition and the Nation State offers an extended study of the social and cultural legacies of state division in Ireland and Palestine, two regions where the trauma of partition continues to shape political events to this day. Focusing on the period since the 1960s, when the original partition settlements in each region were challenged by Irish and Palestinian nationalists, Joe Cleary's book contains individual chapters on nationalism and self-determination; on the construction of national literatures in the wake of state division; and on influential Irish, Israeli and Palestinian writers, film-makers and public intellectuals. Cleary's book is a radical and enthralling intervention into contemporary scholarship from a range of disciplines on nations and nationalism. It will be of interest to scholars in Cultural and Post-Colonial Studies, Nations and Nationalism, Irish Literature, Middle East Studies and Modern History.

Contents

• Ireland Palestine and the antinomies of selfdetermination in the badlands of modernity: 15
• Estranged states national literatures modernity and tradition and the elaboration of partitionist identities: 51
• Part II: 95
• Forktongued on the border bit partition and the politics of form in contemporary narratives of the Northern Irish conflict: 97
• Agonies of the potentates journeys to the frontier in the novels of Amos Oz: 142
• The meaning of disaster the novel and the stateless nation in Ghassan Kanafanis Men in the Sun: 186
• Notes: 226
• Index: 251

Popular passages

Page 8 - The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

Page ii - Rights Discourses on Race and Sexuality: Britain, 1968-1990 o 521 45921 4 2 David Richards, Masks of Difference: Cultural Representations in Literature, Anthropology, and Art o 521 47972 x 3 Vincent J. Cheng, Joyce, Race, and Empire o 521 47859 6 4 Alice Gambrell, Women Intellectuals, Modernism, and Difference; Transatlantic Culture, 1991-1945...

About the author

Joe Cleary is Lecturer in English at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth where he teaches Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Literary Theory, and Renaissance Drama. He has published widely on Irish literature and film and on contemporary political and cultural theory in books and journals such as The South Atlantic Quarterly and Textual Practice.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine; Volume 10 of Cultural Margins
• Author: Joe Cleary
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2002
• ISBN: 0521657326, 9780521657327
• Length: 259 pages
• Subjects: History / Asia / General; History / Europe / Great Britain / General; Literary Criticism / European / General; Literary Criticism / Semiotics & Theory; Political Science / Colonialism & Post-Colonialism